


Don't You Know

by feverishsea



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverishsea/pseuds/feverishsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She walks by car crashes and witch hunts, headless horsemen and impossible choices. She cocks her head and cocks her gun and keeps walking, because that’s what Abbie Mills does, and seeing into hell hasn’t changed that.</p><p>She knows what she's doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't You Know

**Author's Note:**

> [I'm over here on Tumblr, come say hi!](http://seatsreservedforheroes.tumblr.com/)

“You don’t know what you’re doing, Abbie,” the dead man tells her, love and hope faded from his eyes so that they’re empty voids, so dark it hurts to look at them. “Stay away from Crane. I’m telling you this because I’m trying to protect you.”

Abbie smiles at him a little, because he’s doomed and damned and she can’t not pity that, and then walks on by. She never asked for advice. She never does.

She walks by car crashes and witch hunts, headless horsemen and impossible choices. She cocks her head and cocks her gun and keeps walking, because that’s what Abbie Mills does, and seeing into hell hasn’t changed that.

One rainy afternoon she takes the time-traveling half of the partnership to Starbucks because she said she would. And though she tries not to encourage it, she honestly can’t get enough of Ichabod’s reactions to this strange new world. Ichabod Crane is six feet of idealism and grace under fire, and there is nothing funnier than watching him refuse to admit he doesn’t understand how a laptop or cigarette lighter work.

“My God, this coffee has chocolate! And heavy cream! And it’s frozen! And… oh good lord, Ms. Mills, this coffee is over  _five dollars_ , this single drink, I cannot allow you to pay for it.”

What she can’t do is stop smiling; she keeps it under wraps, but it’s there, tugging at the corners of her mouth, and she sees Crane watching with a warm answering smile. People around them are trying very hard not to look at the odd man with the not-quite-British accent but Abbie’s not too worried about it; even Before, you could count on Sleepy Hollow to be just a little odd. It was the kind of town where you smiled at your neighbors and kept inside after dark.

“Just be glad I didn’t order you tea, Mr. Boston Harbor,” she says before grabbing their drinks off the counter and leading them to a table. Ichabod trails behind her, playing along and happily bitching about how even were she to be so insensitive, he cannot imagine that any sort of tea would cost  _over five dollars, my God_.

Abbie plunks the drinks down, and then herself. She’s picked a table with three chairs; two across from each other, and one in the middle. Crane sits right next to her, and Abbie manages not to smile at that too, just pushes over his drink and sips her red-eye.

He hollows his cheeks when he sucks on the straw, like he’s still not exactly sure how to use it, which is totally ridiculous but endearing, much like Ichabod himself. She waits for the moment when his eyes go round and surprised at the syrup-sweet taste, and isn’t disappointed.

She’s suppressing a chuckle into her cup of coffee, savoring the warmth on her palms and the quiet hum of the coffee shop, when the pressure of a shoulder against hers shocks through her system. Abbie never quite remembers how alone she is until someone touches her.

But melancholy can’t keep its grasp on her when she turns and sees Crane’s blue eyes looking down at her, close enough that his breath brushes her forehead. There’s a certain tension to his face that makes her think Crane is as hyper-aware of the touch as she is. He doesn’t move away.

“I don’t mean to be forward, Ms. Mills, but would you mind terribly if I, er, sampled your concoction?” He gestures to the drink in her hand. Abbie blinks and hands it over without a thought; Crane blinks back. 

He takes it hesitantly, like he wasn't expecting her to say yes, and cradles it in his hands, long fingers curling around the cup. Compared to her Crane is so warm that sometimes Abbie forgets he must be lonely too.

Crane tips his throat back and swallows a gulp. His eyes fly open wide and he slams the cup down on the table, coughing. Tears leak from the corners of his eyes.

“Very - very good,” he sputters, and Abbie doesn’t even try to smother her laughter.

***

Jenny flips a knife overhand and catches it perfectly. She’s doing it just to annoy Abbie, so Abbie swallows a sigh and leans over her tattered old manuscript again.

“You know, I could take Icky to the grocery store this week if you don’t want to do it,” Jenny says, so close to taunting her that Abbie has to clench her hand into a fist underneath the desk.

“I got it, but thanks. I promised Crane I’d show him how the self-checkout works this time. He might find the presence of a gun comforting.” Abbie turns a page. Still no information about the horsemen, other than “bad news, 0/10, do not invite over for dinner”.

The silence stretches on. Like with an angry toddler, Abbie operates under the assumption that Jenny is probably fine as long as she’s yelling.

Abbie glances up and finds Jenny staring at her with something closely and horribly resembling sympathy in her eyes.

“What?” Abbie demands, sharper than she meant to. Jenny’s eyes narrow.

“He’s got a wife. You remember that, right? Didn’t really take you for a cheater.”

Abbie’s hackles are all the way up before she can stop them; nobody gets under her skin like Jenny, even after all these years. “His wife is - she’s not  _here_  anymore.” More quietly, she adds, “And anyway, it’s not like that.”

Jenny’s eyebrows don’t so much arch up as twitch; a suggestion of it. “Yeah? Then what is it like? You don’t understand, just because his relationship is something you can’t imagine, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You have no idea what you’re doing.”

Discretion is often the better part of valor when it comes to Jenny. Abbie leaves the library, Jenny’s smirk firmly embedded in the forefront of her mind. Her hands clench on the steering wheel as she drives to Crane’s cabin. 

What the hell does Jenny know, anyway? Abbie gets that Crane still feels like he’s married, sure, but that can’t last forever - even people like herself need other people, and Crane is so much warmer and softer than her. Eventually, something will give, even if it's not with her.

And it’s so like Jenny to make Abbie the villain of this picture. Like she’s plotting to make Crane do… something. Abbie doesn’t want to make Crane do anything. She’s a veteran of not one but two office romances; she knows how these things end, in the mundane kind of awkwardness that makes you wish you’d just never gone down this road in the first place. It's bad enough in a police station; she doesn't really want to imagine what it would be like in this situation. Things are safer like this.

Her tires hit gravel faster than she was expecting; she speeds when she’s angry. Abbie tries not to tick off another mark against Jenny in her head and mostly fails.

Her boots grind into the dirt and stomp across the wooden porch like a declaration of war. But when Crane opens the door, he looks delighted to see her. Just like always.

“Come in! I’ve just made tea, would you care to join me, or must we leave immediately? Will we be late for this supermarket?” He ushers her inside, and she starts to thaw.

“Actually, I think you're about 200 years early,” she says dryly. A thought occurs to her. She leans forward over the table. Attentive as ever, Crane leans forward to match. “You know, we don’t even have to go to the grocery store. If you want to go somewhere else, do something else… You could just tell me. Is there anything you want to do?”

For a split second, she thinks about taking Crane somewhere fun. Not his kind of fun (old books), or even her kind of fun (baseball), but  _fun_ fun. A club, drinks, a throbbing beat shaking your bones.

He’d be totally lost at first, sure, but she’d grasp his hand and he’d follow her in, cheerfully bitching in her ear about how odd and barbaric this is. They’d grab a seat at the bar and lean in close to hear each other. They’d drink. After awhile they’d dance, figuring out how their bodies fit together and tilting their heads to look at each other.

Then Abbie looks at Crane, really looks, and all stupid thoughts go flying out of her head.

Because Crane looks miserable, suddenly, in a way she’s only seen once or twice before. His tea is cooling on the table and his shoulders are hunched, like he’s trying to fold in on himself. He’s staring down, resolutely not meeting her eyes.

“Hey. Hey, Crane. Doing alright there? Something I oughtta know?”

Very slowly he lifts his head and dammit, it takes everything she has not to jump out of her seat and go to him, to put her arms around his neck and let him sink into her and hide from all his troubles for a minute.

But she can’t do that. Those are the rules. So she doesn’t. She just looks at him patiently and waits.

“I… I am sorry, it is just…” Crane swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing in his long neck. 

Through what’s clearly sheer force of will, he lifts his head just enough to meet her eyes. “I am well aware that I am a man out of time, thrust into a land rife with wonders and new technology of all kinds. And I always considered myself something of a scholar; I should appreciate these things, give them their due. But I…”

 

“But you don’t want to,” Abbie says slowly. It’s something she’s known, somewhere in the back of her mind, but never really thought about before. But yeah, it’s odd, that a man like Crane doesn’t want to explore the full length and breadth of what the 21st century has to offer.

Crane looks up at her gratefully. She doesn't exactly smile at him, but her eyes are warm.

"That's okay, you know. You don't have try to get up to speed on the 21st century if you don't want to. We're all already here. You'll get here too, eventually." Abbie thinks that's true; she knows that Crane is hurting now, but she also remembers the way his eyes light up when he learns something new, when she takes him somewhere he's never been.

Right now, he doesn't want to push himself. He wants his hand held. For a man like Crane, she can do that.

Crane does smile at her, sweet and slightly crooked. "Once again I find myself exceedingly grateful that I met you, Ms. Mills."

Abbie lets that go by. She stands up and nods toward the door. "So, you want to go try the self-checkout?" she asks, and Crane clambers to his feet eagerly.

(It turns out that Crane  _loves_  the self-checkout, though he keeps trying to talk to it and refuses to stop addressing the mechanical female voice as "madam".)

***

If there's one thing Abbie never needed to learn from the Horseman, it's that there are many ways to die. 

She's been a cop for awhile now, and part of the Real World for even longer, and she knows from seeing it that there are endless ways to die. Murder, accident, flash flood, car crash, lightning, allergy...

Abbie became a cop to protect people, and that doesn't change just because she doesn't happen to be wearing a uniform, so when she sees the car about to hit Crane, it doesn't even really register that it's him before she's running, slamming into him.

She's not tall but she's strong; she hears the impact knock the air out of Crane's lungs, and they go flying forward over the pavement.

They jolt to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk; the car that didn't notice the blink of the Pedestrian Crossing light zooms by but other cars slow and zigzag around them, confused.

Abbie pants out a breath, not fighting the adrenaline as it floods through her system. Crane is staring up at her from between the bracket of her arms; his hands have come up to clutch at her sides, fingers curled into her shirt.

"I - I don't understand," he coughs, winded. "But I believe I should thank you, Ms. Mills. Though I fear my shirt may never recover from this tumble."

Abbie shakes her head in disbelief. "You would whine about your clothes after you almost got mowed over." She manages a strangled laugh.

"Having such a fierce protector enables me to save my worries for these details," Crane says, voice still hoarse. He flashes her a brilliant smile, and yeah, if it came down to it, Abbie would die for this man and consider her life well spent.

She pushes up, wincing a little as her scraped knees press into the concrete, and offers Crane a hand. He has to let go of her waist in order to take it.

Later that night, when the memory of the crosswalk has all but faded from her mind, Abbie and Irving are performing a feeble attack on the mountains of paperwork that are threatening to engulf them after so many weeks of the supernatural.

She pushes aside a stack of unsigned papers with a groan and notices Irving watching her. If it were anyone else she'd raise her eyebrows and ignore it, but this is her captain, so she can't. "Yes, sir?"

Irving shakes his head, which means she doesn't want to hear what he's gonna say next.

"You know how very little I want to talk about your personal business," he says, drawing his arms up over his head to stretch. "But I just want to make sure you know what you're doing. Because this whole 'co-witnesses to the end of days' thing is fine and well until the apocalypse arrives, but you might want to consider not getting too attached. He may look like flesh and blood, but he's, what, 250 years old?" Irving quirks an eyebrow at her.

She doesn't want to ask, but she does anyway. "You think he's going to die, sir? I mean, assuming the whole apocalypse thing doesn't kill us all anyway."

Irving shrugs, a frenetic movement that betrays his discomfort with the supernatural as a whole. "Who the hell knows? I'm just saying, the man got spelled to live, got tied to a very literal demon, and we have no idea what will happen if we actually manage to avoid the end of days."

"That seems like a pretty big if," Abbie points out.

He nods. "Yeah, it does. But it's worth thinking about. You do good work, Abbie." She hears the unspoken  _we need you (to not fall apart)_.

She nods back. "Understood, sir." Irving looks dissatisfied, but goes back to his paperwork with a rueful smile.

Abbie doesn't think she'll fall apart if Crane dies, but then again, she's never known anyone quite like Crane before. She pulls another stack of papers toward her and starts to fill out boxes by rote. 

Her phone buzzes; Abbie tips the screen up and immediately has to tamp down a grin. Crane's sent her a text message. It reads  _qzhgjdsuj_.

She taps out  _ **Keep trying, Alexander Graham Bell**_ , and goes back to the files.

It's just that Crane is so earnest and good, but not in the least cloying. Being around him is like having access to the very best parts of herself, and believing that she can be who she is and be that, too, at the same time. Because if Crane can walk around sassing people as easily as breathing, and still be the kind of man he is, that means there's hope for her.

She picks up the phone before it vibrates itself off the desk. He's managed  _ihate th iszthing_  this time. She's impressed in spite of herself.

_**Up late, aren't you?** _

_sozareyou_

_**Why do you keep hitting z? & yeah, paperwork. I still do my job occasionally.** _

_if youw ishf or companyyyy ihavetea %*#_

_**How late will you be up?** _

_aslong as you need_

_#@^#@_

_blast_

_i cant findthe and key_

That hits her in the chest, warm and soft and difficult. She automatically sets the phone and the emotions off to the side, staring at the paperwork with unseeing eyes.

"You're tired. Go home," Irving says. She tries to protest, feeling ashamed of her distraction, but he waves it aside. "No, really. You're doing double duty here with Killer Sunday School and your normal police work. Get out; get some rest."

So Abbie goes, but she doesn't go home.

Crane pulls the door open and leans against it, smiling at her. "I didn't think you would come at such a late hour," he says, watching her walk inside. "You never have before."

She smothers a yawn and walks over to the TV. "You remember how to use this thing?" she asks.

He flourishes the remote proudly and then proceeds to hit the up button about a thousand times because he still hasn't mastered how channels work, but damned if he doesn't love the History channel. Specifically, he loves mocking it.

"Oh come on now, that weapon isn't even in the right century!" Crane howls at the tiny marching Redcoats on the screen. "Why don't they just call it the We Can't Be Arsed With Facts channel?"

Abbie chuckles and lolls her head back onto the sofa. The cabin is quiet, and Crane is a comforting warmth at her side, almost close enough to brush knees. "If I fall asleep here, I just want you to know that I can't remember the last time I got more than three hours sleep at a stretch, and I have a gun, and I will totally shoot you."

Crane tips his head back companionably and laughs, a low, throaty sound. He rolls his head around to look at her. "Very well," he says, his eyes lit up with cheer and mischief. Or maybe it's just the reflection from the TV. "Should the very denizens of hell come knocking, I'll simply leave them to bring their doom upon themselves by disturbing you."

"Gee thanks," Abbie mutters, and snuggles down further into the sofa.

"During the Revolutionary War, women were often nurses or spies," the TV narrator intones. The flickering light obscures Crane's eyes; he glances away.

The closer she gets to Crane, the more she remembers his wife.

But then another battle scene comes on, and they both watch it in bemusement, and the moment ebbs and flows.

"That dead man just opened his eyes and looked around."

"I don't think it should be legal to use ketchup for fake blood."

"I'd imagine it certainly wouldn't dry the right color."

"Ew, Crane."

Crane stretches out his legs; it somehow shifts him closer. When a commercial blares out a loud jingle Abbie startles and then relaxes back down, curling just over Ichabod's shoulder. He tilts his head away and his arm down, baring his neck. Abbie settles her cheek onto the edge of his shoulder with a sigh.

Oh, Abbie knows what she’s doing, but it’s so hard to care.


End file.
